Now India probes Google, threatens $1bn fine over 'biased' search Google has confirmed to The Register it is being probed in India over allegations that it unfairly promotes its own services over rivals in web search results. The California goliath faces a fine up to $1.4bn – a tenth of its annual profit – if it is found to have broken monopoly laws in the country. The Competition …
There's no way Google makes 10% of its profit from India, surely closer to 1%, though I suppose a fine based on profit in India is subject to the various ways that multinationals can easily hide revenue and/or profit in other countries. One option Google would have would be pulling out of India. I highly doubt they will, but a fine that is so outsized compared to the profit they make there has to put that on the table as a potential response.
But good luck to the Indian Supreme Court if it thinks it can enforce a fine upon the global profits of a foreign company. Thought experiment: what if ten other legal systems imposed a "10% of global profits" fine - would they decide who misses out with quick game of "rock, scissors, paper"?
"But good luck to the Indian Supreme Court if it thinks it can enforce a fine upon the global profits of a foreign company."
I don't see why not. A jurisdiction can level a fine of any amount they want. For example, the US government frequently levels fines on foreign companies well above 10% of global profit.
The EU has a similar law.
"Thought experiment: what if ten other legal systems imposed a "10% of global profits" fine - would they decide who misses out with quick game of "rock, scissors, paper"?"
The company wouldn't make profit that year?
The fine can easily be enforced if the company concerned wishes to continue trading in that country. Also, why should anyone miss out if the total fines came to more than 100% of global profits? Companies like Google and Apple are worth a lot more than just a single year's profit figures. They'd be hurt badly, but nowhere near bankrupted. It might even make them pause and consider some changes.
Is there any major tech corporation whose business model is currently more exposed to legal risk around the world than Google's? Even Samsung makes a lot of things whose status are not in doubt. That Java lawsuit is going to hurt. Guess they shouldn't have spent all that money buying Web 3.0 gambles.
Apparently, Microsoft is one of the biggest backers of the investigation.
You don't say…
Actually, I wonder what product Microsoft claims is unfairly penalized by Google. They have no more map service, and surely they're not asking Google Search to show results provided by Bing? Do they have a social network?
Given that Social Network and Excuse to collect data on you for monetisation reasons are synonymous.
Microsoft should just go ahead and start one, as they are already collecting data on their users. they'd get more data and probably fewer complaints about their current data collection activities.
.. judging the amount of "probing" :).
The monopoly status of Google is hard to deny in the search world IMHO, but I am a bit worried that people are going to go a bit too much "the enemy of my enemy" here. Don't think Microsoft is complaining about monopoly status for your benefit.
It's because they're jealous.
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Calling Google a search monopoly seems a bit off, since as far as anyone has claimed, it does not actually sell "search" to the gazillion people or so who use it. While it does sell advertising access, it apparently sells it on the same basis to anyone who wishes to buy, and is far from the only such seller. It appears that in India, as in Europe, the complainers are doing so because Google will not do for them, at no charge, something that, as a business model, it charges its customers for.
"It's because they're jealous."
I don't think emotions come into it. It's just hard headed business, if somebody can find a way to try to get one over on a rival then they will. Otherwise they are not doing their job.
What do people expect with a commercial search engine? Of course it's biased, it's not there because of benevolence. You want good search results then you pay, that's how it works. It's an ad platform.
Dominant players have to tread carefully; the closer you are to being a monopoly the more scrupulous you are required to be to preserve some oxygen in the room. As you say Google is almost the only search game in town, raising the claimed prospect that they can charge advertisers arbitrary amounts (see the many stories here on El Reg about the opaque and unpredictable pricing model, a.k.a. the "chocolate factory") and then not even deliver the expected service since Google's own competing product can be featured as a super-premium result.
Back in the late 90s Intel engineers were reportedly aghast at seeing Microsoftees boasting in emails about crushing the competition, giving it away for free to cut their legs out, etc. Intel had already had anti-trust beatings in the early 90s and had taken the message on board: don't go boasting on the record about abusing your power. This was at the height of the WinTel alliance and supposedly led to Intel increasing focus on Linux in part to have the defence "we're just a chip supplier, not half of the duopoly" if it was decided to breakup MS.
As far as I can tell Google is not, in India, nor in Europe, nor was it in the US, charged with using its popularity as a search engine to enable it to charge excessive rates to advertisers. It may possibly be doing that, although in view of its search popularity, it certainly would be justified in charging substantially higher rates than Bing or Yahoo. But that is not the complaint. The complaint seems to be, instead, that Google fails to place results for services that do not advertise above its own competing services.
Those who wish to have links to their services promoted above those to Google's competing services probably could arrange that as part of an advertising contract if they wish, but they should not expect such placement at no cost by government intervention.
Non-paid results should get the same weight as sponsored or Google product's, unless noted by "sponsored" or "paid", based on a "fair" algorithm. They should be able to demonstrate that easily without giving away the keys to the kingdom...
"Dominant players have to tread carefully; the closer you are to being a monopoly the more scrupulous you are required to be to preserve some oxygen in the room"
I'd like to see a Google rep stand up in a court of law and say "Well it's not our fault, that out of Bing, Yahoo and ourselves. that we are the only one that doesn't suck"
I'd like to see a Google rep stand up in a court of law and say "Well it's not our fault, that out of Bing, Yahoo and ourselves. that we are the only one that doesn't suck"
Well, to be fair, that would IMHO be a factual statement. That is exactly how Google came to prominence in an area previously dominated by the likes of Alta Vista (remember them? No? QED) - their search algorithms were better, and they were clever in presenting them (the first page is almost blank, so you get lured in, it's only with the results you get bombarded with advertising).
The problem is in their advertising - they also advertise their own services, and that is a simple and fairly easy to understand conflict of interest as they are in control of the ranking. That's what this is all about. There IS a conflict of interest here, and I think it's right this is looked at in court.
Many articles and comments confuse between "monopoly" of search, a misnomer since the price paid for search is zero, and a possible monopoly of web-based advertising, a paid service in which they may have a large enough market position to fall under monopoly law in some jurisdictions. It appears from news reports that the complainants are not advertisers, so have no basis to complain about an advertising monopoly. Instead, they want the various governments to require placement of their services ahead of normal search results - at no cost to them.
So what? Even that whole debacle was a complete waste of time. Why didn't they get sued for including notepad??? paint??
That, again, was simply a case of one company 'trying it on' with the government (or more likely they had their own pocket politician with whom they swapped brown paper envelopes)
Browsers have never been a monopoly and neither are search engines.
If advertisers don't like the playing field then go to a different one. Let's see how that works out for you.
What You Pay For Google
If you want to know what sort of monopoly Google are, take a look at the first graph on this page.
It shows how Internet advertising now takes £7billion a year. That's approx £116 pounds per year for every man woman and child in the whole country. For just the wage earners it's more like £250 per year. All that money ultimately comes out of our wallets because its included in the price of the goods we buy.
15 years ago you were £250 a year better off.
Market Gouging
Every time Google add a new feature to their services, that figure goes up whether or not you use Google. That because as a consumer you have zero choice as to what advertising services are used to promote the goods you buy. That's a choice for the seller, not you the buyer.
And there's no way sellers will choose to not advertise because they fear losing market share.
It's a vicious circle, and it's one that the people who ultimately pay for it all (the consumer) have no control of.
That's the type of business that Google run. And Yahoo, and Bing, etc, but they're simply not as good at it as Google.
It's a pretty distasteful arrangemet, Google being able to gouge the market simply by offering a new service. It's not surprising that legislators all over the free world (i.e. not the USA) are beginning to take an interest in it.
Overlapping Monopolies
By endeavouring to make places like Google one-stop shops for everything you need from the Internet, they're creating a closed ecosystem. WIthin that ecosystem they run a monopoly. By making that ecosystem big enough (like they have done) it's too big for advertisers to ignore; they have to advertise inside it. Google adds a new service, they can screw the advertisers for a bit more cash.
Apple have done the same, and Yahoo and Bing would dearly like to achieve the same thing too.
Saying that there is choice on the Internet is a bit mad; once you've chosen an ecosystem it's difficult to leave. You cannot keep that email address, all your contacts are hard to transfer, etc. You're stuck. Google know that.
It's going to take ages for governments to reign it all in.
It's going to take ages for governments to reign it all in.
It's far too late for that. If a government allows a company to make revenue with questionable tactics to the point where it is able to buy politicians you're beyond the point of control. That has already been proven by companies like Microsoft.
I don't think Google's search results are that solid. Have you noticed how even if you've put a phrase in quotes Google will show results ignoring the quotes? That makes you look through lots of pages of results (and hence ads) before deciding that no, they have no useful result. Not useful to me, but renumerative for Google.
Also Maps is worse than ever, full of bugs. Tried getting rid of a way point recently on a route?
I don't think Google's search results are that solid. Have you noticed how even if you've put a phrase in quotes Google will show results ignoring the quotes?
Yeah. I used to switch back to Google if DDG or similar wasn't providing useful enough results, but these days it's not helping. Google is no longer following it's own search syntax rules - or they've changed them without updating the info. So, now straight Google is a lot less useful.
... and it's still crappy when searching for coding terms that use non-alphanumeric characters (eg chars like ; : + ++). It would be so damn useful to have those characters actually count in a search. :[
Why should it be surprising if G+ results come up ahead of facebook?
Google will doubtless be able to index all G+ content easily as it's their product,
I'm assuming facebook has some data hidden depending on privacy
If the searching person has signed in and they have a G+ account then based on data in G+ Google can give data with extra "relevance" based on that persons friends, communities etc. (plus some data that is "hidden" by default, but available to that person as they are in a "private" community)
I'm sure theres plenty of best guess / stitching together of data at Google so that if user is logged in then Goggle has a good idea what facebook, twitter etc. account that person has, but even if they did guess correctly Google would not be able to do the same "relevance" linking as they can with their own data.
Similar with "media" results such as Google owned youtube, google photos results, Google has all the data of it's companies indexed, can use persons account info to improve result "relevance", whereas with flickr, instagram, vimeo or whatever they are limited by privacy settings.
(Obv people may be members of none, some or all of the social networks mentioned)
To avoid legal issues an easy solution is to allow user more ability to tweak their results settings, so if someone wants facebook, twitter or whatever to have different weighting (be that higher, lower, none) in results then it can easily be done.
As an aside, would be interesting to see how good Googles user specific adaptive algorithms are. Presumably if a user uses Google search and then frequently clicks through to facebook links in results then over time Google will prioritize facebook results for that user in search results presented?
I know I see different results on a search "signed in" as me than my wife does (she's not familiar with all the search operators so I emailed her a complex search query for data she was looking for), when I walked over to her machine, and she had pasted and run the query, the results were noticeably different to what I had just seen (all other settings the same, on same network so same IP going to Google)
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